Jeffrey Katzenberg and Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, traveled to Jerusalem late last month to meet with Israeli President Isaac Herzog. The couple presented Herzog with a facsimile of the Hitler Letter, a correspondence written in 1919 by Adolf Hitler that called for the destruction of the Jewish people by “a government of national strength.”
The piece is on permanent display at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, fell on June 26, a date that marked June 26, 1945, the anniversary of the signing of the charter that established the United Nations by representatives of 50 countries. During the trip, Katzenberg also visited the Jerusalem Museum of Tolerance for the first time.
“As the former head of the Jewish Agency, President Herzog has traveled the world and understands what the current global rise in anti-Semitism and intolerance means. He knows the terrible price our world paid for ignoring Hitler’s Letter of September 16, 1919, where Hitler wrote: ‘Our ultimate goal must be the total elimination of the Jews,’” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Given the current instability in our world, our delegation came away with a strong feeling that President Herzog will act decisively to confront the haters. As Simon Wiesenthal warned, ‘Freedom is not a godsend, you have to fight for it every day.’
This story first appeared in the July 14 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here for subscribe.
